Determination of domain for diagnostic wind field estimation in Korea

A diagnostic routine is applied to estimate wind fields for two coastal areas with mountains in Korea. The reliability of the predicted wind fields is assessed by calculating the maximum differences of wind speed and direction between two successive estimations by increasing the size of the estimation domain over the target domain. The differences decrease and stabilize after a critical increment to produce an optimum domain size used to estimate wind fields. Although a larger radius of influence and a larger grid size could increase the stability of convergence, they smooth the predicted wind field and decrease the resolution. The study also reveals that the estimated wind field shows larger differences from the wind field obtained with all stations available in the country, at higher mountains along the boundaries beyond which stations would be added if larger domains are employed. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.